State overrides NYC on food stamp fingerprinting

Making good on a promise he made in his January State of the State presentation, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state would end a requirement for food stamp applicants to be fingerprinted.

“I think it’s important that government, like all of us, leads using its head and its heart,” Cuomo said via telephone at a Red Room event. “We shouldn’t treat the poor or the hungry as criminals, and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

The announcement was greeted warmly by hunger advocates and large faith-based service groups, including the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and the New York State Catholic Conference. Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard spoke warmly of Cuomo, saying he was “giving witness to the solidarity that can and must exist among all New Yorkers.”

They said the fingerprinting requirement needlessly attached extra stigma to the program. Now, a citizen would be able to apply for food stamp benefits from home.

Thirty-percent of New Yorkers who are eligible for food stamp assistance — 1.4 million people — do not participate in the program, leaving over $1 billion in federal funds unclaimed each year.

In 2007, then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer allowed counties — which administer the program — to apply for waivers from the requirement for various categories of applicants. Most counties, including Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady, took advantage of them. Schoharie and Columbia counties fingerprint some food stamp applicants.

The five boroughs of New York City did not for two key categories: people over 60 and working families. Officials in the Big Apple have argued finger printing helps them reduce fraud.

“We’ve found that finger imaging identifies potential duplicate payments and prevents fraud, which saved more than $35 million over the last decade in a program that now provides services for 1.8 million New Yorkers annually,” New York City Human Resources Administration Robert Doar said in a statement. “We remain committed to doing everything we can, consistent with state and federal regulations, to protect the integrity of the food stamp program.”

Cuomo’s aides are advancing new regulations — which will become law in mid-July — that will simply eliminate the requirements.

It’s unclear how many more New Yorkers will enroll in the program as a result of the change, but Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, estimated “certainly thousands or tens of thousands.”